How to build yourself an endless crisis

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's Help To Buy Scheme seems to be working. House prices are rising at their fastest rate in three years. But there is a novelty with the 'boom' this time round

Suppose you were ‘young’, which means under 25 to the EU’s statisticians, which would you prefer: living in a crowded London house with a job to go to (and often paid cash in hand) or staying at home in, say, Barcelona, with little chance of getting any work at all?

The question answers itself and not just for Spain. Youth unemployment in the so-called Club Med countries ranges from Italy, the best, at 40 per cent, to Greece, the worst, at 62 per cent.

And all the rates are rising. Our own rate, though nothing to boast about, is half the Eurozone average and falling.

The inevitable inrush from the EU has created what the authorities label a ‘housing’ problem but which is, in reality, a population problem.

The Government has stepped in with the classic politicians’ answer to the problem of low economic growth by trying to get a housing boom going, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Chancellor George Osborne’s Help To Buy Scheme, guaranteeing lenders up to 20 per cent of the price of a property, seems to be working. House prices are rising at their fastest rate in three years.

Here you might think are merely the familiar ingredients for a housing boom to be followed in due course by a housing crash — as with all the other artificial booms. True up to a point. But there is a novelty this time round.

Can the Government match any prospective rise in house building with the rise in immigration from the EU — soon to be augmented by Romanians and Bulgarians?

If so, then the youth of Spain, Portugal etc, will be even more eager to come to the UK — and especially London.

In other words, if the Government ‘solved’ the housing problem, it would only lead in due course to . . . yet another housing problem. It is like baling out the ocean.

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One useful measure of the lack of any real plan keep the tide at bay is that the Government proposes landlords should make sure their tenants have proper legal status to be in the UK.

It is not easy to see how this will make a difference if the production of an EU passport is all that is needed. Or, indeed, what offence a landlord should be charged with for failing to spot, for example, a technical flaw in some forged Middle-Eastern travel documents.

The Government is understandably in a panic about the Romanian and Bulgarian questions.

Since it has had three years to muse on these issues, you have to marvel at Downing Street’s taste for procrastination.

If it looks like a racket and sounds like a racket...

One of the great advantages of being a thorough-going Conservative or conservative is that you can smell a racket a mile off. The Lib Dem type is the opposite.

He it is to whom you might sell the Forth Bridge or at least an endless supply of books on the perils of global warming, designed to scare you out of your skin. The supposed menace is now widely acknowledged to be a myth.

Still, the period when politicians have been suckered in has been used to serious effect, especially in bending the mind of David Cameron who promised us ‘the greenest of green governments’, leading the EU in its greenliness.

But then he was never a proper Conservative, was he?

A triumph of the catastrophists has been the erection of wind farms all over our countryside. To people like me this was an obvious racket. It is now accepted that these turbines are inefficient and a burden on the taxpayer

A triumph of the catastrophists has been the erection of hideous wind farms all over our countryside.

To people like me this was an obvious racket. It is now accepted that these turbines are inefficient and a burden on the taxpayer.

In short, a racket profiting only those who put them up. One day, they’ll earn even more to take them down again. But we must have an alternative to oil, say the catastrophists. No, we mustn’t.

You can read oil statistics all the way back to 1910 if you wish. It is only if you fail to read the small print that you can find a cause for alarm.

And today, we not only have huge and ‘proven’ reserves of conventional oil, we also have the phenomenon of fracking. This has caused panic in the catastrophists’ camp.

Money and jobs are the drivers of the green and other allied causes. Just think of the cash winkled out from the taxpayer by universities to study climate change.

The EU is another example of a racket. What wonderful jobs it has created, what costs, what salaries for the panjandrums in charge.

They’d never have done so well under their own governments. Highly-paid, novel offices are not so easy to create when exposed to public opinion at home.

Every time any government creates a new department or embraces a fresh cause, the first question to ask is: Who profits?

A dose of scepticism always helps and you do not have to wait until a venerable old age to find that out.